Archive: August 2012

I finally understood what “box” people had in mind when they talked about “thinking outside the box”.

It is obvious that they meant that in order to have a good idea one must go beyond the limits of logic and let their imagination: fly. But what I didn’t understand was what the box had to do in this story.

This is what I discovered during our Skype video-call with the kids from Thinkids and the girls from La Vall School. We shared our projects with them and received their feedback. One of the things I realized during this activity was that adults often underestimate kids abilities. It was amazing to hear them give their opinions about the different projects and how the ideas that seemed absurd at first were actually great ones.

When seeing them I understood that when we are born we are like an unshaped material that life transforms into the shape of a box. This box represents the knowledge we achieve, the people we meet, the experiences we live and the fears we have. These four elements are the ones that usually limit our creativity.

This way, through time, the more we develop these elements the further the limits of our creativity get. This is why we should always try to free our mind from our knowledge, experiences and fears when we want to be creative, to the point of becoming as open-minded as kids are.

I strongly believe that we should try to learn from kids and encourage them to make the most of their creativity potential. So don’t ever grow up, keep thinking like a kid!

A day with Angelika Blendstrupis more than a normal day, and you should better be ready for it. Angelika can really change the way you think, and in Imagine we love that!

What I like the most about Angelika is her ability to detect errors in everything you say or do. You can feel that after every session with her, you highly improve your communication skills and the strength of your speech. This, in Silicon Valley, is the key to success.

This time, we started the session developing a ‘twitter-friendly’ message as a summary of our projects, showing us how pitches have changed with the sucess of Twitter. At the same time, she encouraged us to ‘make the best of our accent’, which means speaking calmed and emphasizing the keywords of our speech.

She also advised us to take as much advantage as possible of the use of silences and breathing, which allow us to introduce the key ideas in a catchy way.

Afterwards, Angelika started talking about some of the cultural differences between Spain and the United States, specially referred to the communicational aspects. For instance, she talked about how both cultures differently criticize each others work. In Spain people usually point out an error directly to the person responsible, in the United States that should be done on a gentler and nicer way.

She finished forcing us to focus on what really makes our projects unique and different, by establishing a personal brand. After working with our personal pitches the session finished with a short but inspiring exercise in which we tried to explain the core of our projects in a 2-3-2 words sentence, which forced us to summarize our pitches and, at the same time, try to connect with the audience.

Overall, it was a fantastic and enriching experience as always is with Angelika!